Knowledge, Acknowledgement and Denial in Serbia's Responses to the Srebrenica Massacre

Abstract

This article considers some post-Milosevic Serbian responses to the Srebrenica massacre. The focus is on responses which contain strategies of denial or which broadly attempt to explain or justify the massacre without engaging critically with the atrocity itself. These responses are by no means uniform, nor are they the only ones which are available in Serbia. They provide the focus of this article because their presence has usually been misinterpreted as Serbia's failure to come to terms with the past. As this article argues, the existence of denial strategies in politics is predominantly pragmatic, whilst in the media and in private individual narratives are part of a larger process of starting to re-examine the past. This article will focus on several illustrative instances from politics and the media, as well as an individual witness responses, in order to demonstrate the extent to which Srebrenica is still in the process of being understood.

Keywords:

• Srebrenica
• post-Milosevic Serbia
• war crimes
• atrocities
• denial
• coping strategies

Acknowledgements

This article was completed whilst on a visiting research fellowship at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, Finland.

Notes

¹ Denial makes use of several key strategies, including the use of evasion, metaphors, moral justifications, displacement of responsibility, dehumanisation and the blaming of victims (Bandura, 1999, pp. 194–203; Tsang, 2002, pp. 39–43).

² The Croatian nationalist army; in contemporary usage it is often used as a derogatory term.

³ The SAA agreement is a part of the Stabilisation and Association Process, the EU's policy towards potential member states in the Western Balkans. Its purpose is to ‘establish special relations between the countries concerned and the Union in exchange for reforms with a view to accession, which will involve aligning their legislation more closely with that of the Community’ (Anon., n.d.).

⁴ Between 2004 and 2008 the coalition government was made up of the conservative Democratic Party of Serbia and the more pro-European Democratic Party.

⁵ Such an assumption has most recently been made by Serbian war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic in an interview days before Karadzic's arrest (see Sekularac, 2008).

⁶ Exceptions include progressive and critical publications such as Vreme and Danas and media networks such as B92.

⁷ Bratunac is the site of a 1992 attack on a Serb village by local Muslim forces.

⁸ See the articles ‘Sve propale deklaracije’ (Anon., 2005a) and ‘Srebrenica je oslobodjena’ published in the newspaper Danas in 2005.

⁹ These culminated in the Djninjic assassination but are also present today—for instance, Chief Prosecutor for war crimes Vladimir Vukcevic still receives death threats (Anon., 2008b).

¹⁰ Videos of the meeting and the film Istina can be streamed from the front page of SRS's website www.srs.org.yu (accessed 26 April 2007). Quotations from the meeting are my own transcription and translation.

¹¹ ‘Na teritorijama Jugoslavije, mnogo zlocina je pocinjeno. Mi Srbi, kao clanovi nacije koja je patila najvise, moramo da osudimo sve zlocine: one koje smo mi Srbi pocinili, i one koje su pocinili clanovi drugih nacionalnih grupa. Sa ovim fimom, mi se borimo za istinu … ako postoji neko u svetu ko jos uvek nezna o zlocinima pocinjenjim protiv Srba … ovaj film ce im pokazati kako su Srbi ubjiani, monstruozno masakrirani i proterani iz njohovih kuca samo zato sto su Srbi … neki mediji i politicari se naticu ko ce od njih osuditi Srbe najvise, oni prikazuji Srpske zrtve kao neobicne i sporadince. Zato je nas zadatak da osudimo sve zlocine … nas zadatak da branimo Srpski narod od primremljenog proganjanja.’

¹² The original used is repriza, which in Serbian is usually used to denote a ‘repeat’ of, for example a television programme.

¹³ The lecture is summarised on the group's website (Nomokanon, n.d.) and in the article ‘Srebrenica je oslobodjena’ (Anon., 2005b) published by the newspaper Danas.

¹⁴ ‘Muslimani traze osvetu … i osude protiv naseg naroda su napravljene na bazi lazni svedoka, laznih nestalih … sa ciljem da se ugasi Republika Srpska.’ See for instance International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (1998) and the Beyond Reasonable Doubt/Izvan razumne sumnje documentary. A DVD of the documentary, filmed by the SENSE media agency for the ICTY, was given away with copies of Danas in Belgrade throughout 2006, together with other similar documentaries.

¹⁵ ‘Gruba relativizacija zlocina u Srebrenici i pokusaj medijske negacije skoro donesene presude.’

¹⁶ Particularly since large sections of the populations only saw, and still see, Mladic as an ordinary soldier ‘just doing his job’ and certainly not as a criminal (see Obradovic, 2008).

¹⁷ The name is a pseudonym.

¹⁸  Q: Sta si tada znala o Srebrenic, sta sada znas?

A: Pa vidi, stvarno je tesko biti objektivan u tim situacijama, pogotovu kad znas bekgraund, i onda znas da ti, gledajuci sve to, i onda slusajuci te ljudi koji su bili tamo borili se i onda dolazili ovde, da li je to bilo Hrvatska ili Bosna, kad slusas sve to, kad slusas kako se Srbi bore tokom rata, kako Muslimani vode rat, onda vidis da nije svo to … Ali, desilo se, prvi put moram reci, da su Srpski vojnici ubijali decu. U prvom u drguom nisu. Bilo sta bilo, dete je dete. I tvoje dete je ostalo kod kuce, i to je bilo postovano. Ali sad, desilo se das u Srpski vojnici ubiljali decu po prvi put. To je bilo najverovatnije zato sto se razumelo za vreme Balkanskih ratova i za vreme Turaka i u Prvom i Drugom das mo mi ilmali najvise dece ubijene. To znaci da je tvoj neki genetski potencijal ubijen, buducnost … tako da kad ti ubjes decu nacije ubijes i buducnost te nacije. To je ta besmislenost rata o kojoj ti pricam. Tako da sad, vojnici su ubjili decu da zastite svoju decu. Zato sto istorija te je naucila.

¹⁹ This dynamic is explored further in Obradovic (2008). For a comprehensive discussion of individual responses to violence see Daniel (1996) and Bar-Tal (2003).

²⁰ Personal communication from Jovanka Matic, 6 October 2007.